Homonyms

One of Emma's assignments each week is to do various activities with her spelling words. Once, she wrote a story, incorporating each word. Another time, she assigned each letter in the word a number value and calculated the total word value.

Today, she was supposed to make a Rebus, drawing a picture to represent each word on her spelling list. She quickly whipped out cute little drawings for "toe," "slow" (a turtle), "old (a wrinkly face, which she was quick to insist was not one of her grandparents), and "mind" (a gooey pink brain). She came up with great sketches for "by" (a large tree next to a small tree), "follow" (a girl walking behind a dog), "dry" (a girl holding an umbrella in a rainstorm), and "row" (a sailor in his boat at sea).

But when she came to word #9, she was stumped. I was cleaning around the kitchen, watching her as she worked. And I noticed that she was really struggling with what to draw. She would put her pencil to the paper, think for a minute, then pull back perplexed. Since she had come up with the other drawings so easily, I wondered what word was giving her such trouble.

Me: Emma, are you having a hard time with your next word?

Emma: Yes.

Me: What is the word?

Emma: Load. Do you know what that means?

Me: Well, it could be a verb, as in you are loading the dishwasher. Or it could be a noun, as in the truck has a heavy load.

Emma (relief coming over her face): OH! I can draw that. I thought it meant, well, you know. . . (whispering) what the boys say they do in the toilet.

I'm just glad to know that, even with two older brothers, she's still feminine enough to hesitate at drawing a big brown pile of crap on her spelling assignment.